Antiviral Effect of Cimicifugin from <i>Cimicifuga foetida</i> Against Human Respiratory Syncytial Virus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Human respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) causes serious infection of the lower respiratory tract in children and an effective antiviral therapy against the viral pathogen remains unavailable. We previously demonstrated that the oriental medicinal plant, Cimicifuga foetida L. (C. foetida), possessed inhibitory activity against RSV. Since cimicifugin is a major constituent of C. foetida, we sought to examine in this study its anti-RSV effect on both the human upper (HEp-2) and lower (A549) respiratory tract cell lines. Results revealed that cimicifugin dose-dependently inhibited RSV-induced plaque formation in both HEp-2 and A549 cells (p < 0.0001), with a superior effect in the latter cell type (p < 0.0001). The antiviral activity of cimicifugin was time-dependent (p < 0.0001) and was most effective when cells were treated with the compound before viral inoculation. Additional experiments demonstrated that cimicifugin could inhibit viral attachment (p < 0.0001) and viral internalization (p < 0.0001). Furthermore, the drug could potentiate heparin's effect against attachment of RSV, particularly in A549 cells. Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) analysis of antiviral cytokines induction revealed that cimicifugin could also stimulate epithelial cells to secrete IFN-β to counteract viral infection. Taken together, these results indicate that cimicifugin is an efficient antiviral agent against RSV infection. We suggest that cimicifugin might be useful for the management of RSV pathogenesis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".